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New Standard Keyboard
An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."
Stop perpetuating myths.
Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?
is this one
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This story needs some more details. The website is a re-hash of the press release and appears to be a naked grab to get some adsense revenue. Not to mention that details on the product itself is scarce, and it takes a lot of digging to figure out that this keyboard doesn't even have dedicated number keys. Nice idea, no story yet.
Here's a close-up picture.
From http://www.chicagologic.com/QWERTYrumor.htm --
A long-lived rumor is that typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to slow down the typist.
If this were true, he would have located popular letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.
What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh", "ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.
This design change actually had the bonus effect of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.
A 1953 U.S. General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the two keyboards. Fingers travel less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".
http://almostsmart.com
The new keyboard layout was designed such that computer salesmen of poor typing skills could type TUBGIRL with one hand, all along the same row of letters.
Unfortunately this did not stop the keys getting sticky.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
The problem with new keyboards is the pervasiveness of the QWERTY system. One has to run a cost/benefit analysis of replacing QWERTY keyboards - be it with the DVORAK or this new alphabetical version. Many computer users are experts with the QWERTY layout, and can have a high amount of wpm (words per minute). Perhaps, if one switches, the benefit will result in a higher wpm achieved - but there will be quite the learning curve.
You'd have to institute it with people starting to use computers, because it'd be organizational suicide to replace QWERTY w/ DVORAK/alphabetical due to the steep learning curve and the resistance to change.
Personally, I'm great with a QWERTY keyboard, even knowing that it is designed to be an inefficient system and would never change to an alphanumerical keyboard, despite the ultimate benefits. Shortsighted perhaps, but I don't see the benefit to the steep learning curve. I'm willing to bet that many organizations won't be willing to make that step either.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Have you seen this thing? Since when did FisherPrice start making keyboards?
And where's the space bar?!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
There is only one "standard" keyboard (QWERTY) and everything else.
And until there is something that is easy enough to learn without any practice, I doubt that anything will replace QWERTY.
Why does the "Tech-Blog" have no author and read exactly like a corporate press release, trying to cram down my throat why I NEED this keyboard?
It's probably some of the most blatant advertising copy I've read in quite a while. At least have some subtlety to get your product "reviewed" by one of the tech magazines or something...
Please help metamoderate.
From the article: After 130 years of typing the same way the keyboard has finally grown up.
Alphabetizing the keys and giving it a garish Fisher-Price color scheme does not make a keyboard grown up. One of the benefits of a QWERTY keyboard is that a good deal of typing is done with keystrokes alternating between the hands, speeding things up quite a bit. Alphabetical keys may make it easier for "hunt and peck typists as well as senior citizens who have never had a computer because they are challenged by the difficult basic keyboard," but it is far from becoming a standard, since the layout is very inefficient for a touch typist.
This article really reads like a marketing press release.
I find it's not the keyboard layout that slows me down, but rather the speed of my fingers. I can type pretty fast, but until someone comes up with a keyboard layout that includes multiple letter keys (e.g. qu, the, to etc) then I can't see how I would be able to type any faster.
Even number entry is very quick and easy. I just can't see how a new keyboard layout would change typing speed dramatically.
Shitdrummer.
Current keyboards do have problems, but this *ahem* example just throws out the baby with the bathwater.
.
One of the biggest problems with the current AT-keyboard layout is the ordering
of digits on the numeric keypad.
I mean, damn near every other keypad in existance begins with 1 at the top left and works its way down to 9 at the bottom right (think telephone, ATM, eftpos terminal, security keypad).
But for some unfathomable reason the AT keyboard standard has transposed the top and bottom rows, so you get 1 at the bottom left and 9 at the top right, making it much more difficult to master data entry.
Which of these looks more familiar:
1 2 3 7 8 9
4 5 6 4 5 6
7 8 9 1 2 3
0 . 0
I'm betting most will pick the former, since the pattern in the latter is much less recognizable if it's not shown in the context of a computer keyboard.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Original press release
Engadget reivew
From the CES show
My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.
Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
the PLUM keyboard (similar idea).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
For many, including me, having to use a keyboard with fewer keys would actually be a step backwards. I like to have a lot of extra keys that I can map to do interesting things and special function keys, these are great timesavers. I often look for keyboards that have more keys, not less, Ive had a keyboard from Gateway 2000 from years ago which allowed you to remap the keys on the keyboard and had several extra keys which I found quite useful. Often it is nice to be able to map macros to certian keys so when they are pressed they can reproduce several characters These can actually save time.
Where's the spacebar? Dude, if I can't hit the spacebar reliably with my FOREHEAD, then I'm not interested!
studies show neither dvorak nor qwerty have an advantage. in fact they show almost any random arrangement of keys appears to work equally well.
I can't get to the article, but an alphabetic keyboard is just plain dumb.
1) The QWERTY keyboard is established tech
2) I see no empirical evidence that alphabetic is easier to learn or use
3) Alphabetic keyboards overwork one area of the keyboard
4) It would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange keys to allow alternating of hands, which speeds typing.
Can anyone list any real reason that this is better? Other than the reduced number of keys, of course.
'> It is compatible with all systems running Microsoft Windows 95 and above.
And this is called "Standard Keyboard"?'
'And above'.
So it'll work on Linux or OSX but not DOS, right?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I only need 28. I use vi.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
What we really need are alternatives to traditional typing -- ways to communicate with the computer in a more efficent manner.
I'm personally waiting for the wireless implant in my head so I can just "think" the words onto the screen
In the meantime, I've tried out the Twiddler2 chorded keyboard, which is a combination key entry and mouse device. Although a bit slower, it is FAR more comfortable surfing and chording with it than using the traditional keyboard and mouse (though you can forget programming). And it plays nice with OS X and Windows.
If you're interested, there are many other chorded "keyboards" as well as many more ergonomic variations to the standard keyboard. A useful resource is the exhaustive Alternative Keyboard FAQ and this alternative keyboard gallery.
53 keys? Still too many. What you need is the full featured pirate keyboard which has only 6 keys! Bad ass design, if you ask me.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
You can actually buy foot pedals for certain keyboards. My Kinesis Contour keyboard has 1- to 3-button foot pedals. I have the older 2-pedal variant, and being an Emacs user, I had them mapped to "control" and "meta". Was interesting, but my wrists aren't bad enough to put up with the learning curve of training my feet...
Finally! A keyboard to match the Look-and-Feel of Windows XP! ;)
Typing "TYPEWRITER" fast was simply a sales gimmick, so the salesmen could tell clueless PHBs "see! It doesn't slow typists down! I can type TYPEWRITER quickly!" And unsurprisingly, clueless PHBs existed in 1870 just as well, long before computers, and corporate purchases were made based on some rigged non-representative demo.
But there were real mechanical considerations there too.
Typewriters used to be purely mechanical things. Hitting a key physically pressed a lever, which swung a small hammer at the paper. Actually, at the ink ribbon. And on the hammer a letter or digit was embossed. (Actually, two. SHIFT would physically raise the carriage, so the second letter on the hammer hit.)
Because it was purely mechanical and involved densely packed thin levers, it was jam-prone. If you hit two keys at the same time, two hammers would try to occupy the same space at the same time. If they were coming from opposite ends, not much would happen: 99% of the time one would just hit on top of the other. But if they were adjacent (or almost adjacent) levers, the machine would jam.
That was the problem they tried to solve: keeping the machine from jamming. Which involved moving the hammers for most common letter combinations further apart from each other. Which, since it was a purely mechanical contraption, involved moving the keys too. (It wasn't as simple as defining a new mapping table, like on computers.)
And whatever effect it had on typists and typing speed, was side-effect rather than considered in the design. Whether it sped them up or slowed them down, it still ended up faster if it didn't require unjamming twice a minute.
However, here's another fun fact: the typewriter for which that layout was designed was very different even from typewriters manufactured after 1900. After 1900 the hammers were arranged in an arc in front of the paper. Before that, they were arranged in a circle or bucket shape.
That bucket shape is what the QWERTY layout was designed for. Which meant that moving the hammers had some weirder effects on where the keys moved. E.g., near the middle of rows, two adjacent keys would swing hammers from opposite sides of the bucket. Hence the "TY" in "TYPEWRITER" would not jam that machine, which is why they're still near each other.
It would, however jam a post-1900 typewriter.
So basically the short story is: QWERTY was never supposed to be ergonomic, it was supposed to just prevent jams. And even that was a quick mechanical hack, which missed a lot of fairly commong combinations. _And_ even for the purpose of preventing jams it wasn't that useful any more, for any post-1900 typewriter.
Yet, more than 100 years even after the new typewriter design, and half a century after keyboards being used in computers (which don't jam) we're still stuck with the QWERTY idiocy.
Its saving grace, though, is that basically on a computer keyboard _any_ layout works just as well. Neither jams nor alternating hands (which made sense back when you had to hit the keys HARD on a typewriter) are relevant any more. You just type faster on whatever layout you're the most used to. For most people that means QWERTY.
Which means there's little real incentive to switch to a new layout.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I say:
I switched because less finger travel made my hands less tired at the same typing speed. I still use both layouts, but if I am typing a lot, I will use dvorak.
When I first thought about switching, I created an Excel macro to count finger reaches in QWERTY phrases and one for Dvorak. I also started making a list of common words that can be typed on the home row in each. In both of these endeavors, Dvorak won. roughly 25-30% less finger travel, more in some phrases. Many more common words on the home row.
Here http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ is a company that makes ergo keyboards with vertical rows, QWERTY, Dvorak, or both.
History says:
The slant of the columns on the keyboard is an artifact left over from mechanical typewriters.
For those not acquainted with the story of the keyboards, here's a short version:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/
I have nothing witty to fill this space with yet.